


Growing Pains

by ancestrallizard



Category: Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor
Genre: Brief Mention of Blood, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-18
Updated: 2018-02-18
Packaged: 2019-03-20 22:16:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13727088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancestrallizard/pseuds/ancestrallizard
Summary: Rose has a headache.





	Growing Pains

**Author's Note:**

> My first time writing present tense for a fic, so I apologize for any inconsistencies.

Pain knifes through Rose’s skull, resonating through the blood vessels and crevices of his brain and trickling down to the roots of his teeth, making him faintly nauseous. It crowds out thoughts of food, of future battles, even of survival, until he can think of nothing else.

The dull ache when he’d fell asleep the night before had metamorphosed on the dawn of the seventh day of the lockdown. Sleeping on the hard ground of a park probably hadn’t helped any. He had Peri cast Diarahan on him just before sunrise, then cast it on himself, as well as Amrita for good measure, but all in vain. The sensation spread unchecked, through his head and down his neck, until it felt like his nerve endings were being skinned.

The silence that stretched through park as they waited for Naoya, Atusro next to him on a park bench and Kaido off somewhere else, should have been soothing, but it was more unnerving than anything. Rose had gotten used to having more people around, whether fighting or thinking of ways to save everyone and end the lockdown or even just waking up in the morning. With the absence of any outside stimulus besides pain, his mind kept drifting back to the previous night. The fear and disgust and disappointment in their eyes when he said he was doing to end the lockdown by becoming King of Bel, made him feel – something, and it was intrusive and annoying, whatever it was. He barely knew Keisuke and Midori, and didn’t know Yuzu that well, all things considered. He shouldn’t care. He doesn’t care.

He shut his watering eyes against the empty morning light, and would have traded his COMP for any kind of painkillers. 

His shoulder brushed against Atsuro’s when he took a breath. He’d started working on his COMP since he woke up, and had looked away from it maybe once since then. Rose had never been close enough to notice before, in the scattered times they’d interacted at school, but Atsuro was taller, like Rose once wanted to be, and more muscular than Rose would have thought. It was only because of how tired he was, that he wondered if Atsuro might have been better to lean on, sleep on than ground had been. There wouldn’t be anything to get in the way – his headphones had been smashed to pieces in a fight days ago.

“Something wrong, man?” He asks, fingers still skating across the COMP buttons. 

Too much to list, Rose thinks, but just mutters, “Head hurts.” 

“Want me to summon a demon to fix it?” 

“Tried that. Didn’t work.” Rose grimaces in discomfort. This was the longest he’d spoken since waking up, and it was only exacerbating the issue. Maybe it was karmatic punishment.

The sounds of typing stop. Rose opens his eyes, and Atsuro’s face swims into view. He was frowning, searching for something, Rose doesn’t know what. “Maybe you’re sick? We haven’t seen if Amrita works on colds.” 

Rose frowns. “I’m not sick. It feels like I hit it on something, but I haven’t.” The fight against Belial had been tough, and at one point the demon had knocked him back into the metal stage stairs hard enough to dent them, but he’d never hit his head. 

Atsuro put the COMP away, and stares at him like he was a coding problem. Rose nearly bristles. He waits, apprehensive, but Atsuro doesn’t suddenly break away and laugh, and tell him to stop making such a big deal about it. “Where does it hurt?” 

Rose stares, but a mocking glance or anything similar still isn’t forthcoming. He motions generally around the top of his head. “Around here, somewhere.” There might have been specific origin point at first, but the pain spread like creeper vines for hours. Everything ached. 

“Do you want me to take a look? Maybe I can find it.” 

Rose fought not to close eyes at the overbright light as he stared down the other boy. The concern made sense. He was their candidate to be King of Bel, and things would go south quickly if he couldn’t fight and they couldn’t fix it. He’d grown to know Atsuro over the past six days, more than he ever had in school. He was strong, and clever, and devastating in fight, but he didn’t kick people when they were down as far as Rose had seen.

Rose wordlessly inclines his head forward, and grits his teeth when the motion sends a wave of disorientation crashing into the backs of his eyes. 

Even when he expects it, Rose still freezes at the initial contact of Atsuro’s hand on his head. He moves in closer to look, and his fingers, quick and light, don’t weigh down hard enough to exacerbate whatever was wrong. It occurs to Rose, suddenly, sitting so close to Atsuro that he could almost smell him, was the closest he’s been to another person in a long time, not counting being helped up after a battle. To his mild surprise, there’s no caution or trepidation crushing his chest in a vice. Even the pain in his head had begun to die back. He feels warm. It’s almost nice. 

“What are you doing?” 

Rose’s stomach twists. Just as his cousin disappeared when he needed to find him, Naoya also had a knack of showing up when Rose least wanted him around. 

His red eyes glittered as he looked down at him, arms crossed and near grinning, like he was on the verge of some quip. If he made one, Rose couldn’t guarantee he’d leave the park unsigned. He was not in the mood. 

“Naoya!” He can’t see Atsuro’s face, but he can hear the embarrassed flush in his voice. He pulls his hand away, and the edge catches on – something, and razor agony shoots through Rose, like a bruise and laceration and broken bone all at once. He flinches back, hard, and glares at him.

Atsuro leans away, holds up hands in apology. “Sorry. He hurt his head and magic isn’t fixing it.” He says to Naoya, then turns back to Rose. “But I think I found what’s wrong. Can I show him?” 

Rose side eyes his cousin, who stares back, guileless, then forces his head forward again, the stark vulnerability of bearing the back of his head resurrecting all the tension from before. Atsuro brushes the hair back from the spot he’d nicked, more carefully than before. A weak breeze blows across the exposed skin, raising a chill along his spine. “Here it…” Atsuro begins, but trails off suddenly, like he forgot how to speak. 

That his cousin is dead silent as well is what finally sets sharp-clawed panic crawling up Rose’s throat. “What?” 

“Um.” Whatever it is, it’s stopping Atsuro from looking away, or forming full sentences, and that doesn’t ease his rapidly building terror at all. “You. It’s.” 

Naoya cuts to the chase. “It’s horns. You’re growing horns.” 

He looks up, waits for one or both of them to say that they’re just kidding and tell him what the real problem is, but both look somber as the grave. Rose ghosts a hand over the spot.

A small risen nub of bone, still painful to the touch, was growing from his scalp, and there was another lump growing across on the other side of his head. Neither had been there when he’d woken up. He found where some of the pain was coming from, at least – they were growing through the skin of his scalp, leaving torn raw edges of flesh around their perimeters. Blood dampens his fingertips when he pulls his hand away. 

Horns. He was a thing that had horns. Rose’s empty stomach churns and the acrid ghost of bile floods his mouth. He’s fairly sure he’d be sick if he’d had any food in the past twelve hours.

He stares through Naoya more than at him. “You never said this would happen.” Rose says, his words deceptively colorless. 

His cousin shrugs. “Does it matter? It doesn’t change what we need to do, and if you become King, you can make yourself look however you want.” He turns away. “Let’s go, we’ve wasted enough time already.” 

He grits his teeth and stares at Naoya’s retreating back as he leaves to talk to Kaido. Protests and questions boiled in him, buoyed by a rising tide of fear and indignation, that yes it did matter, as he liked to know what was going on with his own fucking body, and, why didn’t Naoya ever mention this, and, did he not see the goddamn horns, but he knew from years of firsthand experience that any of it would be a waste of breath. 

He follows his cousin in a rush, without looking back at Atsuro. The thought of the other boy staring at him in fear and disgust was inexplicably distressing, and didn’t want to stay and risk seeing it.

Every once in a while his fingers drifted back to prod near the strange growths, and could swear he feels them incrementally growing longer and sharper. The pain was dulling, not gone completely but mitigated to the point that he could probably fight unhindered. He supposed that was what mattered most. 

Were there horns because Belial had horns? He hadn’t noticed any changes after Beldr, so why now? Would he end up a jigsaw of every bel he killed by the end? What would even be by that point? 

“You know,” Naoya says, in a measured, even tone that instantly has Rose’s guard up. “If this is how to react to the horns, I imagine you’ll have a lot of problems with the tail.”

Spells had to be said aloud to have any effect, for humans at least, but if there was a way to set someone’s robe aflame with just one’s eyes, Rose was determined to find it.

**Author's Note:**

> Naoya is not being helpful in the least.
> 
> I'm getting close to done with Overclocked. I talk about it and other stuff on my tumblr, feel free to drop by: ancestrallizard.tumblr.com


End file.
